The overarching aspiration of this project is to combine multiple diverse research topics under the goal of robotic pollinators. By bringing together experts from biology, computer science, and mechanical and electrical engineering, our end product will be much more than the sum of the parts.

While a project of this scale relies on numerous interactions and requires tight collaboration between the investigators, the proposed research neatly falls into three aforementioned categories: body, brain, and colony.

• The body involves all aspects of the proposed work that revolve around construction of a flapping-wing robot. We will explore several aspects of free flight mechanics and performance to guide our design of an autonomous robotic bee.

• The brain incorporates all of the sensors, control (i.e. algorithms and software), and circuitry (i.e., hardware) to coordinate flight and target identification capabilities of the RoboBees.

• The colony encompasses higher-level support required to accomplish objectives of a complex task in a collaborative manner. We seek to leverage the colony as a whole for parallel, energy-efficient, and robust operation.

This project emphasizes collaboration between researchers across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines to realize its ambitious goals. It also offers an exciting platform from which to share scientific and technological breakthroughs with the public in a tangible, easily-accessible manner.